I pretty much finished the HDN website in June. However, here, they only really started working with a few weeks before my arrival. That meant that, now, some functionalities needed to be changed, as well that quite a few small bugs were uncovered.
All this has, so far, resulted in very busy days, as I also have to work on the project which is the reason for my being here this time around: A digg like website which will combine two existing HDN run projects, HealthDev.org and TheCorrespondent.org.

We’re settling in. We’ve rented a scooter and have driven around quite a bit already. We visited Doi Su Thep, probably Chiang Mai’s most prominent tourist attraction, as well as a series of other wats (temples), ordered a laptop for Betsy and have good food, three times a day. We even started playing trivia again and we were off to a good start, coming in third last Monday.

To get from Bangkok to Chiang Mai, we took an overnight train. Understanding what type of service you’ll get before you get on is a bit hard. We figured that second class sleepers with fans wouldn’t be too bad. Actually, it wasn’t, but we also had no private cabins, the lights stayed on all night, as did the windows, mostly.
The train started with 15 carriages, only one of which was a sleeper. Regular second class meant having to spend the night in a luxury recliner seat. Third class meant spending the night, on a moving train, on benches seating either three or two, with no armrests. Man, was I happy with my cramped upper bunk right under that glaring neon light.

I’ve committed myself to eating those large bugs, but only after I see someone eating them first. Meanwhile, we’ve had Indian curries, many Thai dishes, great continental breakfast, several sweet fried snacks, cotton candy which resembled the hair I had cut off at the Bangkok train station, fried quail eggs, loads of sushi and much, much more.